Political Ideology – Parking service to be privatised by April 2012
Last Friday afternoon I sat down with UNISON members to listen to a presentation on the process to privatise the Parking service by April 2012.
Understandably staff were upset to be privatised, they asked a number of questions which made it clear that political ideology is replacing sound evidence based decision making.
Last November UNISON submitted a report which you can view here we provided evidence to substantiate our report which you can view here
The report was presented to Cabinet and a number of senior officers and consultants and to date there has been no comment.
Our report claimed
“Actually, there is only one borough (Westminster) that has tried to privatise all their parking service using separate contractors to carry out their enforcement and administrative activities. Their enforcement is carried out by NSL who also dominate the market in enforcement across London albeit their performance is below average. Appendix A provides recent information on parking charge notice (parking ticket) issue over the twelve months to August 2010 compared to the year before. The best performances were from in-house teams (+8.6%). The three main private sector providers’ performances over the same period were comparatively very poor ie. Vinci Park (-3%), Mouchel (-5.7%) and NSL (-13.2%).”
“There is a legal risk associated with the requirements set down in the Traffic Management Act 2004 around decision-making on representations & appeals. LB Westminster is the only authority that has externalised both formal and informal back office activities and their performance at adjudication is the second worse in London with only 27% adjudications won last year (see Appendix C). This is a real risk to both income and the Council’s reputation.”
Scrutiny undermined
Earlier this year UNISON had been told Parking Service business case would be going to Cabinet Resources Committee (CRC) on 21 April.
The decision not to take the Parking Service business case to CRC unlike other One Barnet projects suppports Barnet UNISON’s view that there is no effective evidence based scrutiny of One Barnet projects.
Equalities issues
I have been contacted by a number of members asking if the decision “not to go to CRC discriminatory?”
The breakdown of the workforce is predominantly from the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) community. I will be asking for a copy of the Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) with regards the decision not to go to committee along with the EIA for the business case.
The *OJEU contract
The OJEU notice was sent out 4 April 2011 the contract has been valued between £15- 25 million for a 5 year contract (plus 2 year).
You can view the OJEU notice here
The only justification for privatisation is the private sector will generate money to the council
In our report we stated:
“The surplus within the Special Parking Account (SPA) was actually just under £6m per annum in 2008/09 (Para 4.6) which shows that an in-house team can provide a financially efficient and beneficial service.”
In my discussions with staff, there is one reoccurring theme. They are angry because they believe the service was allowed to fail in order for the service to be privatised.
If you follow the current One Barnet thinking, the Council are privatising Parking (a service which used to high performing and generated far greater income) because it no longer provides enough income. They claim the Private sector will be able to generate the required savings the in-house previously generated! So we are handing over money to a Private sector partner which otherwise could be spent for benefit Barnet residents and not the shareholders of the private sector!
We now await the business case for Parking Service.
* Official Journal of European Union